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Double Weighting

I thought folks might be interested in this short blog talking about "Double Weighting" which in the traditional Chinese systems means splitting your weight 50/50 and is generally thought of as something to be avoided. I've been doing some cross training in some Chinese internal systems bagua and hsing-i and they have really helped my karate. It's a useful paradox for thinking about power generation through shifting between stances. Obviously it raises some interesting questions about horse stance. Hope you all enjoy it and that it sparks something for you:

Postures like holding the tree, Taiji has double weighted stances in a couple of forms, and plenty of internal arts train with something akin to horse stance.

Hmm.. interesting.

Not clear on the thrust of the article really, is it just to say that double weighting in time is to be avoided? I mean clearly the actual physical structure created by "double weighting" training gets used all the time. Seems like a better answer to this is figure out how or where double weighting IS useful, since it's so prevalent in training.

I really agree with the part about balance though..when learning something like a drop step i've noticed this is student's biggest problem, they want to feel perfectly balanced throughout the entire move, which causes them to completely break their momentum by unneccessarily keeping weight on the back foot, makes it slower, less effective, easier to see etc.

I agree Zach. I think the main thrust of the piece (or what I took from it, it is admittedly a bit oblique) was that double weighting in training is more useful in teaching sensitivity to balance than desireable in application. This made me think about how a lot of times in our dojo we focus perhaps too much on what the final stance looks like once everything has stopped moving and maybe we should focus a bit more on the movement between the stances. And I totally agree that teaching new students how to shift their and their opponent's weight is one of the trickier things to wrap your head around, especially because it must be "felt".

In the TCM context I think it is understood to mean if you are double weighting, your energy is "dead". In other words the way you generate power is by transitiong your weight from point A to point B and that if you end up being perfectly balanced then you can't transmit power through the strike/push etc. And that once you are balanced it is harder to get your mass moving (bodies at rest, blah blah). The visualization I always return to is pouring water from one leg into the other, recruiting as much gravity and mass as you can along the way (controlled falling, waves crashing, etc.).

It's also an interesting exercise to think about what techniques/moments is "double-weighting" desirable in a practical application. Your feet parallel and planted before you load an opponent on your hip for seionage for example (or any hip throw). We have a technique where you drop your full weight in a horse stance on to an elbow in front of you.

Some of this is semantic I think, are you double weighted at the moment of impact or does it simply feel like that after the technique is completed? In most striking techniques though, I think you end up projecting your energy through some part of your opponent rather than evenly down into the ground. Joint locks are a bit more eclectic and many can be greatly amplified by "grounding" your mass. I'm curious if Hung Gar folks fighting in horse stance think of generating power differently than we do karate.

Can you think of techniques where double weighting is useful and desireable?

Well postures like Holding The Tree teach you to use chains of postural muscle, to put it one set of terms, it's true that it's static (that's what postural muscle does best-hold you up), but static or not, 'double weighting' is an intrinsic part of learning to use good structure. I guess the problem is when the same pricniple cannot be transferred to movement, where at some moments only one line of the "X: that forms your structure is attached to the ground.